Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "ginger-goodwin"
First chapter of Old Growth
The first chapter of Old Growth, a mystery novel, is now available for a free read.
It’s the sequel to Downshift, my 1997 mystery, published originally by Doubleday Canada and rereleased last year by Five Rivers Publishing. Both novels follow the trials and tribulation of Sid Rafferty, who is kind of an alter ego of mine — a freelance speechwriter living on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, though he gets into more trouble than I usually did.
Official publication date is March 1, but the ebook version is already available on Amazon.
It’s the sequel to Downshift, my 1997 mystery, published originally by Doubleday Canada and rereleased last year by Five Rivers Publishing. Both novels follow the trials and tribulation of Sid Rafferty, who is kind of an alter ego of mine — a freelance speechwriter living on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, though he gets into more trouble than I usually did.
Official publication date is March 1, but the ebook version is already available on Amazon.
Interview about old Growth
Lorina Stephens, proprietor of Five Rivers Publishing, has posted an interview we did last month in preparation for the release of
Old Growth
. I get to put on my old crime writer's hat (imagine a vintage 1940s fedora) and talk a little about my checkered past.
OLD GROWTH - a Sid Rafferty Mystery
Here’s one for those who like my crime-writing side, especially those who have enjoyed my semi-autobiographical mystery, Downshift: I’m self-publishing the sequel, Old Growth, in ebook formats and as a POD paperback. You can buy it from my webstore or through Amazon and other online vendors.
If you like brick-and-mortar bookstores (and who here doesn’t?), you can get your friendly neighborhood bookseller to order in a copy for you. There’s even an audio book version, narrated by the excellent Bob Gonzalez, who narrated the audio version of Downshift.
Old Growth is set on Vancouver Island during the mid-1990s, when dope-growing was a burgeoning new industry and environmental activists were swarming in from all over the world to protest logging of old-growth forests in the Carmanah Valley and Clayoquot Sound. It’s a little less autobiographical than Downshift, but it deals with events I was tangentially involved in as a freelance speechwriter working for forest companies and politicians.
Here’s the blurb:
Freelance speechwriter Sid Rafferty signs on to help a neophyte candidate run for election as an alderman in Cumberland, once a booming coal-mining town on Vancouver Island that's now shrunk down to an out-of-the-way little village. But first another writing job makes Sid a witness to a violent death the Mounties are calling murder, then a pair of marijuana-growing brothers want to know what he's doing poking around near their grow-op.
An old colleague from his newspaper offers Sid a job spying on environmental activists, but he finds working undercover is no picnic. And he's about to find out that in Cumby, old currents run as dark and deep as the abandoned mine shafts. Dig down too far and the past can reach up with a deadly grip.
You can read the first chapter here.
If you like brick-and-mortar bookstores (and who here doesn’t?), you can get your friendly neighborhood bookseller to order in a copy for you. There’s even an audio book version, narrated by the excellent Bob Gonzalez, who narrated the audio version of Downshift.
Old Growth is set on Vancouver Island during the mid-1990s, when dope-growing was a burgeoning new industry and environmental activists were swarming in from all over the world to protest logging of old-growth forests in the Carmanah Valley and Clayoquot Sound. It’s a little less autobiographical than Downshift, but it deals with events I was tangentially involved in as a freelance speechwriter working for forest companies and politicians.
Here’s the blurb:
Freelance speechwriter Sid Rafferty signs on to help a neophyte candidate run for election as an alderman in Cumberland, once a booming coal-mining town on Vancouver Island that's now shrunk down to an out-of-the-way little village. But first another writing job makes Sid a witness to a violent death the Mounties are calling murder, then a pair of marijuana-growing brothers want to know what he's doing poking around near their grow-op.
An old colleague from his newspaper offers Sid a job spying on environmental activists, but he finds working undercover is no picnic. And he's about to find out that in Cumby, old currents run as dark and deep as the abandoned mine shafts. Dig down too far and the past can reach up with a deadly grip.
You can read the first chapter here.
